Franklin Dexter

Many anesthesia departments provide services in non-operating room anesthesia (NORA) locations such as bronchoscopy suites, endoscopy units, and diagnostic imaging areas. Unlike operating rooms, these procedural areas often have variable physician availability and are geographically dispersed. Consequently, anesthesia departments are often asked to provide staffing for procedural services that do not operate continuously throughout the week. For example, a pulmonary service may request anesthesia support for two bronchoscopy rooms operating five days per week. However, pulmonologists performing bronchoscopies often also maintain outpatient clinics, cover other hospitals, or rotate through other clinical responsibilities. As a result, procedural demand fluctuates. The operational question for anesthesia leadership becomes: How much anesthesia staffing capacity should be planned so that pulmonologists can schedule bronchoscopy procedures within a target patient access interval (i.e., within two weeks)? This differs from traditional operating room efficiency problems because the primary objective is to provide proceduralists with access to anesthesia care within a defined number of days, rather than maximizing room utilization. To identify relevant literature on scheduling and staffing for anesthesia services outside the operating room, searches were conducted in Scopus on March 3, 2026. The primary search focused on scheduling terminology appearing in article titles:

Anesthesia providers contribute markedly to surgical site infections for operative (surgical) procedures. This summary shows that there not evidence at this time to recommend applying the more expensive anesthesia infection prevention strategies to non-operating room locations, specifically nasal povidone-iodine, chlorhexidine wipes, and monitoring ESKAPE transmission to provide feedback on sources of pathogen spread for intervention. The steps for all patients are appropriate hand hygiene, machine and equipment disinfection, and intravenous catheter care.